NECC: Enable Reading with 21st Century Skills

29 June 2009 at 9:29 am (Uncategorized)
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I haven’t used this blog for a year now, but I think it might be a good way to keep my NECC notes.  And maybe I’ll start using it regularly again. ;-)

Enable Reading with 21st Century Skills
John Long and Debbie Svec
8:30-9:30, 6/29/09
209B

[note:  he is controlling his presentation—Keynote—with his iPhone]
He showed a video of kids explaining the Pledge of Allegiance to “inspire” us.
OBJECTIVES:
•    Provide and overview of how teachers and MS use toold like iPods, laptops, and Web 2.0 for reading
•    Showcase active strategies
•    Learn from people who are using it.
Debbie’s school is 58% FARMS
•    Went from D to B and still hardly makes AYP
•    Like RHS’s socio-economic diversity
•    Title I
“We’re doing really well given our diverse population.”—Horrible Attitude, if that’s what she really means
60% FARMS in the district doesn’t=diversity, dope!
6 strategies:
Digital Reading Portfolios
•    Capture students’ reading samples throughout the year
•    Capture using iPods, Garageband, or Video (They did iPods with mics.)
•    Store digital reading portfolio for authentic assessment
•    If it’s stored so students can access through the web at home, they can look at what they did and reflect on it.  One student came back with another writing sample he did better after practicing at home.

Graphic Organizers
•    Use Inspiration to organize student thoughts
•    Brainstorm
•    Develop Character Webs
•    Digital Story Telling for kids to show us how they learn
•    Use storyboards to see if they’ve internalized the directions for a project
•    MS has a 1/wk read aloud with girls who are struggling readers.  RAP?—Think about doing this while Bink has TV.
o    Principal provides pizza/drinks
o    They use the iPod Touch to listen to the story and use Cranium Core to assess
o    lowest students in the intensive reading programs
iPods-iRead
•    bought 240 iPod Nanos and only 1 was stolen the 1st year.
o    Loaded audio books that got checked out WITH the printed book.
o    Not allowed to get them out during the day (no elec equip policy)
o    Twilight Series is available on iTunes, which is where they downloaded from.  Range from $5-$40.
o    Have to buy each copy you want.  Can’t just download 1 copy for a classroom set.
o    iTunes can’t do purchase orders, so they had to buy gift cards.  Hard to get through purchasing department.
o    They now take pCards.
o    When you don’t understand a word that is read, underline it.
o    Left the words underlined in the book when they were done because the next kid might not know it, and it will be a comfort to them that someone else didn’t know it.
o    Parents began using them to learn to read, too.
•    Playaway is better for classroom set.
•    She has 1 book per and iPods are numbered.
•    Other MSs load them as the students ask
•    Can do it in a variety of ways
Gaming Software—Cranium Core builds comprehension and excitement for reading
•    Cranium CoRE-Web-based
o    reading, writing, and listening skills
o    engagement factor
o    resource to intervention strategy
o    www.craniumcore.com
o    Read aloud
o    Play the Gameshow
o    Discuss and defend your answer
o    They go back to the stories to prove/defend their answers
•    She has a group of 11th grade football players who are athletic enough to get scholarships but are in danger of not graduating. She eats lunch with them and uses Cranium CORE.  3rd-12th grade
•    $365/yr for the entire school
•    Not just literal questions; they are higher-order
•    ESOL students use it
•    Over 200 titles are available
•    Have to buy a lot of hardware. ☹
Two other strategies:
Podcasting

WebChats
•    with authors; recorded in iChat

Wanted to get around firewall.  Took kids on a field trip to her house.  Why are the coolest things always the ones that could get you fired?  Please, don’t show me the strategies you have to break the rules to use.

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Camelarama

16 July 2008 at 3:24 am (Uncategorized)
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Hmm…so much has happened in the last few days.  It’s a bit hard to remember it all, but here are some highlights:

Everyone is getting sick.  Yes, the general consensus is that we wish adult diapers were more readily available and socially acceptable.  We’ve had a few doctor visits for the more severe cases, and antibiotics have been distributed.  For myself, I’m finding eating difficult and am just trying to eat enough to keep healthy.  I’ll spare the details. 

2 nights ago, we rode out into the desert on camels and slept on then matresses on the desert floor.  The lack of human noise and light were amazing.  I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that kind of silence out-of-doors.  The stars were incredible after the moon set at about a quarter ’til 3.  (Yes, I was awake then…mostly because the wind would kick up every few minutes and force us to pull our blankets over our faces.  So, it wasn’t a restful night but was certainly a neat one!

Saddle sore and full of sand,  we arrived back at about 8:30 am (2 hour rides each way) and moved onto some beautiful gorge towns.  I once again got to swim in a crystal clear river, and although I’m having digestive issues, I’m actually really enjoying myself.  The hotel we stayed in last night was probably a four-star, as it has a pool, hot tub,  clean restrooms, etc.  What a great place to stay after our night outside!  Other than the power going out at about 1:00, making the room rather hot, last night was great.  Today, we are travelling on to some small towns before arriving in Marrakech on Friday, where we will stay with families in their homes. 

All-in-all, the difference in the south seems to be a lack of clean water–you can smell sewage in the air, and we’re quickly learning that even washing water (no one has a water source for drinking and washing, etc) is not really sanitary.  Soap and TP are necessary purse items.   In any case, I’m still loving this place and looking forward to what’s next!

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Updates from Chefchouan

9 July 2008 at 5:47 pm (Uncategorized)
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Hello again!

Well, I actually have upates from Tetuoan, Tangier, and Chefchouan.  On July 5th, we went to a very high-class fashion show and concert at a hotel.  Tetuoan is a very resort-like beachside town in the Mediterranean.  We watched a fashion show with traditional Moroccan bride’s attire.  The outfits had recently been designed by a famous Moroccan designer.  It was beautiful, but a bit out of my circle of interest.  Following, there was a concert by 3 Moroccan women–one Islamic, one Jewish, one Christian.  It was the culminating event of a long festival about women and unity.  The show started late, so the dinner buffet was 2 hours later than planned.  Shortly before the final song ended, our guide told us “be prepared; the whole of humanity is going to rush the buffet after this.”  Accordingly, Marie and I jumped up and walked to where the buffet would begin.  What happened next can only be described as a massive pig trough.  Ambassadors, governors, and other dignitaries, along with Moroccan fashion notables, etc.  (and many, many French and Spanish people) were shoving and pushing each other through the veranda where the food was set up.  It was literally “eat-on-the-run”.  We got food from one table, ate it, and got food from the next.  Before I understood this, a woman saw my full plate and exclaimed “A’jourd hui!” (today!).  It was hilarious and strange.  I truly knew the heart of food aggression that night. 

Tangier
Michael and I walked around the medina and kasbah.  The only thing of note is that I sat outside at a cafe and had mint tea.  This was pretty much a men’s only space by social norm, so I felt very privileged that I was accepted fairly easily; however, I doubt this would have been the case if I were without Michael.

Chefchouan
Last night, we had dinner in a Riad in the medina.  I really can’t describe the beauty of the buildings here.  Chefchouan has a habit of blue-washing, rather than white-washing, their building, which gives this place a faery-like quality.  We walked in the medina until 11:00, when we got invited to a rug shop.  After an hour of haggling, I got the guy down from 3200d (460 US dollars) to 1700 (250 US).  So, now I get to haul a 6×9 rug around for the rest of the trip. Ugh.  Still, it’s school colors, made of 3 kinds of wool, and was locally made by Amazigh women.  Pretty cool. 
Today, we went to the nearby national park and spent the afternoon hiking along a crystal clear river with lush Oleander shrubs and many calm pools for swimming.  We ended at “God’s Bridge”, a natural land bridge between 2 mountains.  It was pretty much a perfect day.  Tonight, we were welcomed into the home of a Muslim Sufi Scholar for a discussion about Sufism, and I’m writing now from the medina at about 11:45 PM.  Tomorrow, we depart for Fes, where we’ll be staying in a Riad; I can’t wait!  In any case, I am to meet up with some friends in 10 minutes, so I’d better go for now…

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leaving Rabat

4 July 2008 at 4:42 pm (Uncategorized)
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Tonight is our last night in Rabat.  Tomorrow, we depart at 7:15 am (2:15 am EST) for Tetuoan.  We have eaten enough calories for four weeks, crammed a 7-week language class into four days, and have had lectures from nine different experts on areas of Moroccan religion, history, politics, women, and literature.  Whew!  When not in class, we had little time to get our homework done and explore, but I did go to le media qadeema (the old city), where the market is to look around and buy a dress for a fancy dinner concert we have tomorrow night.  I paid what some would say is way too much for a beautiful beaded blue traditional Amazigh (Berber, but that word is actually pejorative, so I’m not going to use it again) dress.  It only worked out to me paying about $85 dollars for it, and the gentleman was so nice I was happy to pay that.  (Many other store clerks were very aggressive.)  Last night, we had an historical tour of the city and went to an old fortress, gardens, the seaside, and a mosque.  The fortress had dozens of storks nesting along with many other birds I’ve never seen (yes, I took too many pictures).  We had a long day (learning from about 8:30am-9:30pm), but the evening finished with some mint tea by the seaside, which was grand.

Today, we had a very interesting speaker.  He is a professor of media studies and is also a rather accomplished author.  Usually a Francophone writer, he chose to publish a novel in Darija (Moroccan Arabic), which is nearly unheard of.  Some other interesting projects he’s done are:

Write a collection of character sketches and then rewrite them through objects he gathered to represent them (an art gallery owner loved the book and asked him to actually do an installation of it as art, which began his visual art career).

Write a novel in Rap and then audition teenagers to sing it as a 15-track album, rewriting the chapters to fit a soundtrack.  (He ran out of money after 5 tracks, unfortunately.

Write a novel called Nomad and then decide that it should be nomadic in our Age of the Nomad, as he calls it, with Internet, etc.; turn the chapters into art and music and scenes, etc, some written, some spoken, and hire a set designer to install them in 22 places around a city.  When you finish reading one chapter, you get the address of the next.  He’s actually excited about how people may choose not to progesss and “kill” the story and also how they may choose not to follow the guide and go out of order and interact with the text.  This project seems incredible, and I wish I were still here when it goes in.  It will stay in each city for 1 month and will also be done in Holland (Rotterdam). 

As if that weren’t enough to give him Rock Star status in my book, his PhD thesis was “Refashioning Women:  Image and Representation in Moroccan Women’s Magazines.”  I talked to him about it briefly, and he said “I noticed these magazines were schizophrenic and in serious need of an analysis.”  He said he’d see an article against sexual violence against women adjacent to an ad with a girl presented as a Lolita with a school girl’s apron on and a lollipop.  (I guess some things are universal.)  Anyway, he was fascinating and has got me thinking more about what to do with my project. 

This evening, I went to a French restaurant and paid about $2.75 for a cheese and tomato panini, fries, and salad.  Now, I’m at a cyber cafe.  Prior to dinner, Marie and I chased some teenage boys down to ask them some questions for our students.  We found out that they listen to French and English music but not really Moroccan. (Fans of Eric Clapton, actually)  What was very interesting was that, though they spoke 4 languages to our perception (English, French, Modern Standard Arabic, and Darija), they didn’t count Darija.  Because Darija seems about as different from MSA as Portuguese is from Spanish, I found this very troubling.  I want to look into this more, and it ties into our speaker well.  Anyway, I’m getting a bit sleepy and have a lot to get done tonight, so I’m off for now.  bSlema!  (Bye!)

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in Rabat

2 July 2008 at 9:00 am (Uncategorized)
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Hello!  This is the first time I’ve had a few minutes (and just a few) to type something.  I’m on a French keyboard, so please forgive typos.  After a 27-hour delay at JFK, we arrived in Rabat around 4:00 PM on Monday.  After some rest, we went to an amazing welcome dinner at MACECE.  It consisted of 3 courses of meal and 3 courses of dessert.  I’m not joking.   In the time since, we’ve had four lectures on Morocco and taken 8 hours of Darija (Moroccan Arabic) Language classes.  Needless to say, the meals have continued to be more than enough, so my body and brain feel near explosion.  BUT, I’m loving it here.  I sat in the hotel courtyard last night and practiced my Arabic script to the sound of a lute and doumbek while watching a soccer game.  Oh, crud.  There’s the bus!  Later!

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